CAN WRITING BE TAUGHT IN IOWA?

By Maureen Howard; Maureen Howard's fifth novel, ''Expensive Habits,'' has just been published by Summit Books.

Published: May 25, 1986

THIS WEEKEND, AS VETERANS and high school bands all over America are marching to the local war memorial with wreaths of tribute for those fallen in our wars, more than 300 writers have come together in Iowa City to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Graduates of the nation's first creative-writing establishment, they have convened with former teachers and, much like the rest of the working world, are talking shop. There are commemorative T-shirts, an Iowa Writers' Workshop cookbook, beer and barbecue, a Workshop Ball, but much of the talk - actually organized panel discussions - might seem far-fetched at a down-home Memorial Day picnic or, for that matter, at any other college reunion. The workshop crowd is holding forth on: The Care and Nurture of New Writers; Renaissance of the Short Story; and Beyond Minimalism, Beyond Modernism, Beyond Realism. Toasting the golden years and looking around, the poets, novelists and short-story writers might, indeed, feel like veterans - a few of them heroes, many more casual-ties - of the battlefield of American writing.

At 50, the Iowa workshop is something of a dowager, standing unshakably in the mainstream of our literary life. There are now more than 150 graduate writing programs in this country, at least 100 of them born in the last decade, but in spawning what amounts to a national training ground for writers, Iowa has engendered as well a controversy: Has the proliferation of writing programs led to an industrialization, to a kind of product control of much of our recent fiction and poetry? Do young writers now feel they must have that relatively new-minted degree, the Master of Fine Arts, to qualify as artists? Is it artists or just successful professionals they aim to be? Today, the Writers' Workshop is so illustrious among American writers (real and would-be), editors, publishers and literary agents that a recent graduate might easily refer to his apprenticeship there by saying simply, ''I was at Iowa. . . .'' and the magic aura is invoked without the official name. To what extent can the practice of imaginative writing be accredited? Despite the glamour, the argument is afoot that the workshop system has led to comfortable writing, safe and salable. Could ''Moby Dick'' or ''The Waste Land'' or ''Gravity's Rainbow'' have been written as homework? IT MUST HAVE SOUNDED impractical, even indulgent, back in 1936, the announcement of the Iowa Writers' Workshop - stories to be nurtured in the cornfields, cultivated poems among the prairie flowers - when the economic concerns of a Middle Western agricultural state were far from literary. With farmers broke on all sides, soup kitchens in nearby Cedar Rapids, the then State University of Iowa listed its classes in imaginative writing as the ''Writers' Workshop'' for the first time. Earlier, in the 1920's, when strict scholarly research was the only respectable academic game, the English department had already taken the bold step of handing out advanced degrees for critical and creative writing. The landlocked fellow responsible for that long cultural reach was the dean of the graduate college, aptly named Carl Seashore. So the homestead for the Workshop was staked out on the fertile banks of the Iowa River.

The origins of the Workshop, like its rise to fame under Paul Engle, poet and grand impresario - he directed the Workshop from 1941 to 1965, began as a lecturer in 1937 - are clearly documented; so is the cultural history that made it possible. The 1930's lent themselves to a healthy regionalism in the arts, sometimes in a conservative, humanistic mode that was backed by Works Progress Administration projects. There was a deep concern on the part of writers, painters, theater folk, that American artists draw their material from the strong, at times harsh, reality of the small town or rural scene, a movement that was anti-big city, sought to reaffirm agrarian values and insisted on a vital connection to local setting and history, the unadulterated stuff of American life. Less obvious was the Workshop's growth from the genteel tradition of reading clubs, societies long established throughout the country, which met to discuss the classics as well as the latest literary craze, a self-reliant American idea that assumed an importance in the Middle West, where, not given the overload of Boston or New York, home-grown cultural pursuits were taken very seriously - indeed, held dear. Often, in an ardent, predictable transformation, readers' clubs became writers' clubs, and there we have it: as far back as the 1890's, the first workshops; aspiring poets and novelists handing round their manuscripts, hoping for a helpful critical word, a little artistic camaraderie.

Although creative writing is now a national enterprise, there is still something protected, unworldly, private, going on in Iowa. Young writers welcome the remove from the big, tough world and a public that might not take much time to consider the heavy stresses in a line of verse or the extension of a metaphor that makes a story work. ''It's two years before real life,'' says Debra Spark, a second-year student. A recent graduate of Yale, she has had a story published in Esquire magazine and edited ''20 Under 30,'' an anthology of short stories by young American writers.